Advice

Last week’s parental quandary: How Do You Steer a Teenager Away from the Worst Porn? morphed, in the comments, into a multitude of spin-off questions. What’s “porn?” Does the swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated count, or not? Does placing the lesser evils of pornography, however you define it, within a teenager’s sphere constitute endorsing it, or is such an interest in your child’s sex life “horrifying” and “helicopter parenting at its worst?” “What is wrong,” as Mouse writes, “with leaving your kids alone to find their own way (with the help of their friends) through adolescence?”

What’s wrong, as many agreed, is that what’s easily available to any teenager with an interest in exploring any aspect of sex, be it pornography, erotica or even images of the naked human form in art, is so vastly different now than it has ever been. Attempts to limit access to anything from the likes of “Playboy” to the most graphic of videos are less effective than ever, and the most minimal effort can lead to the hardest-core pornography available. The age of magazines from the garage and the video passed hand to hand has passed, and with it the ability to leave a child alone without at least some instruction on the legal and emotional risks involved in an Internet search on a phrase like “teenagers having sex.”

But many readers, and even the sex columnist and podcaster Dan Savage, weighing in from vacation via Twitter (where he’s known as @fakedansavage), took issue with my framing of the question.

Don’t think you can steer your son to the “right porn.” You can only talk to with him about what porn is — kabuki sex. //t.co/EcevHbnH

So without “steering” or resorting to in-home magazine placement, what’s the role of a parent here? To have the conversation — however that conversation works in your family — about the presence of pornography, the risks and uses of pornography, and the ways both genders, but women most particularly, are portrayed in pornography. In some ways, that’s a new conversation — as Amy O’Leary wrote for The Times this past spring, many parents are finding themselves explaining to very young children what it is they’ve stumbled across en route to “My Little Pony.”

In most ways, though, it’s an old one. Talking with teenagers about sex has been a “parental quandary” since long before the bits and the bytes complicated the birds and the bees. I’m a practitioner of the captive audience sneak attack in the car, and I leave books lying around (not Sports Illustrated) about the science, the mechanics and the emotional aspects of sex and puberty — not to replace the conversation, but to add to it. What’s most important is that we don’t skip the talks because they’re awkward. I’ll take the commenter Julie as a model:

Three teenage boys — and I have survived! Interestingly enough, my Catholic raised husband shies away from down & dirty sex talk with the boys so it falls to me. Frank, frequent, and honest is the way to go. We have one openly gay son (our “sex rules” are the same whether gay or straight: show respect for yourself and your partner, and also for how we raised you), one who is off to college (I am thinking of buying him a carton of condoms …) and one almost 16 yo with steady girlfriend & I KNOW they are active. He was shocked to learn (from me) that you can get someone pregnant without actually “going in.”

All 3 were “busted” looking at porn on their computers and all 3 got the same message from me: nothing wrong with the human body, definitely nothing wrong with sex, watching too much can potentially de-sensitize you to what is real, and when you finally find that true love, you will not need to watch porn anymore to rock your world! … Last but not least Mom’s Rules of the Road: if she tells you she is on the pill, or if he says he has “tested negative” — wear a condom anyway. Your young life is too exciting to be interrupted by an unintended pregnancy or horrifying STD.

About

We're all living the family dynamic, as parents, as children, as siblings, uncles and aunts. At Motherlode, lead writer and editor KJ Dell’Antonia invites contributors and commenters to explore how our families affect our lives, and how the news affects our families—and all families. Join us to talk about education, child care, mealtime, sports, technology, the work-family balance and much more